Archive

As an unknown young artist, Margaret Olley gained instant fame as the subject of the enchanting portrait by William Dobell that won the Archibald Prize in 1948. With Olley’s Mona Lisa smile, the warm, summery colours of her dress and her extravagantly flower-laden hat, Dobell created an enduring image. An embarrassed Olley did not welcome the publicity. This was not the way she wanted to enter the world of art. ‘I also paint,’ she told reporters defensively. Today, her vibrant interiors and still lifes have made her famous in her own right.

This sequel to In Defense of Animals, published twenty years ago, contains fourteen new essays, three revised essays and one that has been reprinted unchanged. Claiming that ‘philosophers served as midwives of the animal rights movement in the late 1970s’, Peter Singer devotes Part I to ‘The ideas’. The second edition displaces the now well-published philosophers found in the previous edition (e.g., Tom Regan, Stephen Clark, Mary Midgley) for a new generation of thinkers. They argue for ‘a new approach to the wrongness of killing, one that considers the individual characteristics of the being whose life is at stake, rather than that being’s species’. An arresting example is David DeGrazia’s suggestion that linguistically trained apes and dolphins are persons, while other members of their species are borderline persons. His justifications are that linguistically trained animals are exceptionally talented by comparison with their lower-IQ species confrères, and that learning a language means one is capable of more complex thought.

The only surviving image of George Bass is surrounded by as much mystery as his death. It is a photograph of a painting that has now disappeared, thought to have been painted in about 1800. A handsome young man looks straight out at the viewer, with a faintly supercilious smirk. His hair is tied back and perhaps powdered – old-fashioned, I would have thought, for a young man in 1800, when Bass was only twenty-nine. Bass is known to every eastern-states schoolchild as half of Bass and Flinders, famous for their exploits in Tom Thumb – actually two different small open boats in which they explored the south coast of New South Wales at different times. Matthew Flinders proposed that Bass Strait be so named because it was Bass’s 1797–98 voyage in a whaleboat that had convinced him that it must be a strait rather than a bay, and led to their circumnavigation of Tasmania in the Norfolk, in 1798–99.

Bill Leak’s first novel, Heart Cancer, is a quasi-picaresque larrikin’s progress that unexpectedly turns into a tale about addiction and self-destruction. It is an enterprising book, but Leak has the difficulty any novelist might in getting the two tones – the comic and the serious – properly balanced.

If Melbourne’s claim to be the ‘world’s most liveable city’ can be taken seriously, it is largely because of its capacity for reinvention, the adaptability of its buildings and infrastructure to an expanding population, and changes in transport, communications, patterns of work, and the general lifestyle of its inhabitants.

The useful introduction to The Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy 2004 (the first volume in an intended new series) gives an idea of the less than adequate state of genre publishing in Australia. For the moment, it seems that science fiction (SF) authors in particular are mainly confined to semi-professional magazines and small presses, or are obliged to seek international markets for their work. Though the editors understandably do not say so, the fact of a small pond necessarily produces some relaxation of expectations. There is much amateurish writing in this collection, and a more serious lack of urgency: many contributors seem less interested in creating new myths than amusing themselves with borrowed ones, like fans dressing up for a convention.